Part 81 (2/2)
”My cousin?” Peter amazedly echoed. ”Why, wasn't it only the other day you were throwing his sacrifices in his teeth?”
Under this imputation on her straightness Miriam flinched but for an instant. ”I did that to worry _you_,” she smiled.
”Why should you wish to worry me if you care so little about me?”
”Care little about you? Haven't I told you often, didn't I tell you yesterday, how much I care? Ain't I showing it now by spending half the night here with you--giving myself away to all those cynics--taking all this trouble to persuade you to hold up your head and have the courage of your opinions?”
”You invent my opinions for your convenience,” said Peter all undaunted.
”As long ago as the night I introduced you, in Paris, to Mademoiselle Voisin, you accused me of looking down on those who practise your art. I remember how you came down on me because I didn't take your friend Dashwood seriously enough. Perhaps I didn't; but if already at that time I was so wide of the mark you can scarcely accuse me of treachery now.”
”I don't remember, but I daresay you're right,” Miriam coldly meditated.
”What I accused you of then was probably simply what I reproach you with now--the germ at least of your deplorable weakness. You consider that we do awfully valuable work, and yet you wouldn't for the world let people suppose you really take our side. If your position was even at that time so false, so much the worse for you, that's all. Oh it's refres.h.i.+ng,”
his formidable friend exclaimed after a pause during which Peter seemed to himself to taste the full bitterness of despair, so baffled and cheapened he intimately felt--”oh it's refres.h.i.+ng to see a man burn his s.h.i.+ps in a cause that appeals to him, give up something precious for it and break with horrid timidities and sn.o.bberies! It's the most beautiful sight in the world.”
Poor Peter, sore as he was, and with the cold breath of failure in his face, nevertheless burst out laughing at this fine irony. ”You're magnificent, you give me at this moment the finest possible ill.u.s.tration of what you mean by burning one's s.h.i.+ps. Verily, verily there's no one like you: talk of timidity, talk of refreshment! If I had any talent for it I'd go on the stage to-morrow, so as to spend my life with you the better.”
”If you'll do that I'll be your wife the day after your first appearance. That would be really respectable,” Miriam said.
”Unfortunately I've no talent.”
”That would only make it the more respectable.”
”You're just like poor Nick,” Peter returned--”you've taken to imitating Gabriel Nash. Don't you see that it's only if it were a question of my going on the stage myself that there would be a certain fitness in your contrasting me invidiously with Nick and in my giving up one career for another? But simply to stand in the wing and hold your shawl and your smelling-bottle--!” he concluded mournfully, as if he had ceased to debate.
”Holding my shawl and my smelling-bottle is a mere detail, representing a very small part of the whole precious service, the protection and encouragement, for which a woman in my position might be indebted to a man interested in her work and as accomplished and determined as you very justly describe yourself.”
”And would it be your idea that such a man should live on the money earned by an exhibition of the person of his still more accomplished and still more determined wife?”
”Why not if they work together--if there's something of his spirit and his support in everything she does?” Miriam demanded. ”_Je vous attendais_ with the famous 'person'; of course that's the great stick they beat us with. Yes, we show it for money, those of us who have anything decent to show, and some no doubt who haven't, which is the real scandal. What will you have? It's only the envelope of the idea, it's only our machinery, which ought to be conceded to us; and in proportion as the idea takes hold of us do we become unconscious of the clumsy body. Poor old 'person'--if you knew what _we_ think of it! If you don't forget it that's your own affair: it shows you're dense before the idea.”
”That _I_'m dense?”--and Peter appealed to their lamplit solitude, the favouring, intimate night that only witnessed his defeat, as if this outrage had been all that was wanting.
”I mean the public is--the public who pays us. After all, they expect us to look at _them_ too, who are not half so well worth it. If you should see some of the creatures who have the face to plant themselves there in the stalls before one for three mortal hours! I daresay it would be simpler to have no bodies, but we're all in the same box, and it would be a great injustice to the idea, and we're all showing ourselves all the while; only some of us are not worth paying.”
”You're extraordinarily droll, but somehow I can't laugh at you,” he said, his handsome face drawn by his pain to a contraction sufficiently attesting the fact. ”Do you remember the second time I ever saw you--the day you recited at my place?” he abruptly asked; a good deal as if he were taking from his quiver an arrow which, if it was the last, was also one of the sharpest.
”Perfectly, and what an idiot I was, though it was only yesterday!”
”You expressed to me then a deep detestation of the sort of self-exposure to which the profession you were taking up would commit you. If you compared yourself to a contortionist at a country fair I'm only taking my cue from you.”
”I don't know what I may have said then,” replied Miriam, whose steady flight was not arrested by this ineffectual bolt; ”I was no doubt already wonderful for talking of things I know nothing about. I was only on the brink of the stream and I perhaps thought the water colder than it is. One warms it a bit one's self when once one's in. Of course I'm a contortionist and of course there's a hateful side, but don't you see how that very fact puts a price on every compensation, on the help of those who are ready to insist on the _other_ side, the grand one, and especially on the sympathy of the person who's ready to insist most and to keep before us the great thing, the element that makes up for everything?”
”The element--?” Peter questioned with a vagueness that was pardonably exaggerated. ”Do you mean your success?”
”I mean what you've so often been eloquent about,” she returned with an indulgent shrug--”the way we simply stir people's souls. Ah there's where life can help us,” she broke out with a change of tone, ”there's where human relations and affections can help us; love and faith and joy and suffering and experience--I don't know what to call 'em! They suggest things, they light them up and sanctify them, as you may say; they make them appear worth doing.” She became radiant a while, as if with a splendid vision; then melting into still another accent, which seemed all nature and harmony and charity, she proceeded: ”I must tell you that in the matter of what we can do for each other I have a tremendously high ideal. I go in for closeness of union, for ident.i.ty of interest. A true marriage, as they call it, must do one a lot of good!”
He stood there looking at her for a time during which her eyes sustained his penetration without a relenting gleam, some lapse of cruelty or of paradox. But with a pa.s.sionate, inarticulate sound he turned away, to remain, on the edge of the window, his hands in his pockets, gazing defeatedly, doggedly, into the featureless night, into the little black garden which had nothing to give him but a familiar smell of damp. The warm darkness had no relief for him, and Miriam's histrionic hardness flung him back against a fifth-rate world, against a bedimmed, star-punctured nature which had no consolation--the bleared, irresponsive eyes of the London firmament. For the brief s.p.a.ce of his glaring at these things he dumbly and helplessly raged. What he wanted was something that was not in _that_ thick prospect. What was the meaning of this sudden, offensive importunity of ”art,” this senseless, mocking catch, like some irritating chorus of conspirators in a bad opera, in which her voice was so incongruously conjoined with Nick's and in which Biddy's sweet little pipe had not scrupled still more bewilderingly to mingle? Art might yield to d.a.m.nation: what commission after all had he ever given it to better him or bother him? If the pointless groan in which Peter exhaled a part of his humiliation had been translated into words, these words would have been as heavily charged with a genuine British mistrust of the uncanny principle as if the poor fellow speaking them had never quitted his island. Several acquired perceptions had struck a deep root in him, but an immemorial, compact formation lay deeper still. He tried at the present hour to rest on it spiritually, but found it inelastic; and at the very moment when most conscious of this absence of the rebound or of any tolerable ease he felt his vision solicited by an object which, as he immediately guessed, could only add to the complication of things.
An undefined shape hovered before him in the garden, halfway between the gate and the house; it remained outside of the broad shaft of lamplight projected from the window. It wavered for a moment after it had become aware of his observation and then whisked round the corner of the lodge.
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